Wednesday, May 29, 2013

There is no question that satellite derived vegetation indices, such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), have been most successful in studying vegetation dynamics globally. Their continuity since the early 1970s and 1980s has been a major accomplishment of NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth, providing an indispensable understanding of the role of vegetation in the climate system. This was undreamed of when Compton J. Tucker came to NASA GSFC in 1975 as National Academy of Sciences postdoctoral fellow. He will share experiences and lessons learned over three decades while studying global land vegetation.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Rapid urbanization, population growth and increasing per capita
consumption is putting immense pressure on our planet's biological capacity in
specific ways and influencing Earth's biogeochemical and climate systems in
ways we don't fully understand. As our economies, actions, and
understanding become global in scale we inevitably wonder if the Earth can keep
up. With all the different appraisals of humankind's future ranging so widely
from planetary overshoot in ecological footprint assessments to
socio-ecological collapse predicted by the Club of Rome models, how do we sort
through it all to get a more useful, scientifically robust, and balanced
appraisal of what the future will bring? In his talk, Marc Imhoff, will
introduce new approaches for addressing these issues using satellite data and
new Integrated Modeling Approaches that couple socio-economics, climate and
energy. These new tools are opening the way for more balanced, useful, and
potentially optimistic appraisals of our future by enabling us to use our best
technologies and skill sets to identify pathways for moving forward in the face
of change.